Factors Affecting Employee Retention in Ethiopian Public Organizations

Employee retention is the process in which employers take steps to prevent the job switching of their key talents. This paper examines the total effect of co-worker relationship, work environment, remuneration job satisfaction, and organizational commitment on employee retention using data from 297 employees holding a position of professional science (PS) from headquarters of public ministerial offices in Ethiopia. The study is quantitative in its approach and explanatory in its design. The analyses of the descriptive statistics revealed that the respondents expressed their satisfaction on their co-worker relationships, working environment, and their jobs. They also expressed average level organizational commitment. However, they expressed dissatisfaction on the remuneration practice of their respective organizations. The correlation analysis results have shown that co-worker relationship, work environment, remuneration, and job satisfaction have weak but positive relationships with employee retention. In other respect, organizational commitment has positive moderate relationship with employee retention. The explanatory power of employee retention factors as shown by adjusted R square is (R =.278), indicating that 27.8% of the variation in employee’s retention is explained by factors that are considered as influencing factors for present study. From the analyses of the study, it can be concluded that factors that are considered in the present study explain significantly employee retention. Hence, organizations need to pay attention to those influencing factors to retain their key talents. Given the limited number of studies on this topic in the context of Ethiopia, this study may be a herald for a much rigorous study.